I'd never heard of James Kilgo or this book, DEEP ENOUGH FOR IVORYBILLS, when I ran across it at the local thrift shop. Although this book, a hardcover first edition, was published in 1988, it looked brand new. I wouldn't normally read a book that, per its cover blurb, is about "a hunter's joyful reunion with the woods and waters of his home country," but when I also read on the back cover flap that Kilgo was an English professor at the University of Georgia, my interest was piqued. The price was right, so I brought it home.

I'm so glad I did, because James Kilgo is a writer with great talent, and, even writing about hunting and fishing in the swamplands, river bottoms and lakes and streams of his beloved home state of South Carolina, he had me from the first line of the first essay, about crossing the Big Pee Dee River. Kilgo writes with skill and sensitivity of his introduction to hunting as a boy, going into the Carolina woods with his father, carrying his grandfather's gun. And of his numerous hunting expedtions with friends into the swampy river bottoms with friends over the years. His feelings about killing are mixed; although he enjoys the camaraderie of deer camp and the "songfeasts" around the fire that follow the kill, he also feels some guilt and confusion, particularly when he returns home to his wife, who does not share his passion for the hunt.

"But as a college professor who taught Sunday school and coached Little League baseball in a town [Athens, GA] where none of my people had ever lived, I could appeal to nothing that might account for a big, rank buck folded into the back of the family station wagon."

Nevertheless, the pull of the wilderness keeps him going back, to hunt birds, pigs and deer; and to fish the lakes and streams. Over the years he initiates his own son to the same pleasures, and watches as his hunting companions divorce, change careers, and, yes, die. All of which give Kilgo reason to meditate on his life and to delve into the history of his own family in the back country of the Carolinas. He thinks more than once about Faulkner's classic novella, THE BEAR, which made me remember reading that slim volume decades back in grad school.

I liked this book so much that I wanted to call or email the author to tell him so. Sadly, I learned that Kilgo succumbed to cancer a dozen years ago. I was still thinking about that when I finished the book last night. Gone for that many years, and yet here I was reading his words in this beautiful little book. Literature really does bestow a kind of immortality on its writers. Kilgo wrote a few other books. I think I'll try to find them, because I was simply delighted by this one. Hunters who think about what they are doing would certainly like this book. But I think anyone who enjoys good writing would like it. I did, most emphatically. Highly recommended. ( )

Dr. James Kilgo has led a life full of excitement and adventure through the Southeastern United States. As Dr. Kilgo writes about his experiences, he pulls the reader in so that you feel you are a part of the story. His characters are real and the kind of people you'd like to sit across a camp fire with and share stories. ( )